A Genealogy of ‘Aura’: Walter Benjamin’s Idea of Beauty

Abstract

No doctrine of Benjamin’s has been more influential in contemporary aesthetic discourse than that of the decay of the aura of the traditional work of art, which he developed in his essay on “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.”¹ Yet justifiable concern has recently been expressed that the conventional reading of the essay in the 1970s has “tended to obscure its more incongruous and ambivalent features.”² Whereas such attention has been directed at elements of the essay tied to the political circumstances of its origin as well as to Benjamin’s lifelong meta-project of a theory of experience, I shall maintain that its philosophically most intriguing ambiguity follows from his introduction and deployment of the term ‘aura.’ Furthermore, I shall maintain that this term’s only decisive incongruities are the legacy of Benjamin’s explorations of a semantically related category some fifteen years earlier, the concept of beauty.